~ Phil Legard

Monthly Archives: June 2015

The various Hexadic pieces written over the last couple of months have been collected together, edited, sequenced and mastered under the title Sorath, which is available to stream and download at Bandcamp on a £3 or more basis. Sorath also includes two additional pieces: Pastorale with Interleaved Progressions and Integral Hexady – thanks to Jesse Jarnow for unexpectedly playing the former of these on his WFMU show!

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Hawthonn’s success as a conceptual album can be seen in its eerie evocation of Coil’s underlying themes – ghostly sketches of possibility emerge from these sonic landscapes, a peculiar and specific spirit hovers over the work. Using what can in some sense be described as musical necromancy the Legards have created a series of sound evocations that allow the listener to embark on a mythopoetic voyage beyond the waking world.

Hawthonn has also provoked some encouraging reactions. David Metcalfe, quoted above, has written an incredible reflection on engaging with the album during a rural retreat over at Modern Mythology. This piece was very interesting and timely, since a colleague questioned me after my paper at The Alchemical Landscape about how people react to my (- and now our -) music. I confess that I rather foundered on this question: having been so concentrated on the creative process during the writing of my paper, and in general, I’ve never really sought out narratives from people who have encountered a deeper experience with it – the kind of experiences that resonate with the ‘imaginal’ aspects of the work itself. Unbidden, David has filled in this missing piece of the jigsaw, and writes beautifully about the relationship between the album, the journal and the making of the work, and his own experience. He has also illuminated some pieces of hawthorn-lore that we were unaware of, and makes the connections between the project and Coil’s Jhonn Balance more explicit. Read the article here.

Photo by David Metcalfe.

At The Active Listener, Grey Malkin also wrote very positively about the project, concluding that:

Hawthonn is a unique and visionary piece of music that is clearly a labour of love and is utterly heartfelt. It speaks of Balance himself and of his loss. It also evokes a rural unease and a true sense of nature at its most wild and unknowable. You need this album; this is an incredible and special work that needs to be heard and experienced.

The limited digital edition of 72 copies, including the album, with additional 32-page journal and 80+ minutes of bonus music is still available here.

Upon first hearing the news about Ben Chasny’s Hexadic System and album, one of the aspects that most interested me was the connection between the Hexadic System and the area of ‘speculative music‘, which is one of the perennial concerns of this blog. This post is a companion to the previous post on the practical aspects of the Hexadic System, and will look more closely at the relationship between the Hexadic System, atonality and ‘speculative music’. It’s a long read, but hopefully worthwhile for those interested in such things!

I. Speculative Music, Past and Present

In its most exoteric (outer, superficial) form, speculative music was traditionally concerned with matters such as tuning, temperament and rhythm: it was the theoretical side of music, opposed to the practice of playing and composing. However, within the neoplatonic worldview that dominated the Western world prior to the Enlightenment, such matters – dealing as they did with ratio and number – were inextricably associated with esoteric doctrines, primarily that of the music of the spheres: some commentators suggesting that the planets, like the notes in a musical scale, were distributed according to similarly simple, harmonic ratios. Given the supposition by esotericists that the universe is relational – as Agrippa had it spanning three worlds: the sublunar, celestial and divine, or supra-celestial – the ratios inherent in the planetary music would have sympathies with that which flows from the ‘divine’ world of souls and spiritual essences beyond them, and that which happens on earth below them. As John Dowland wrote in the high-minded and loftily poetic style of the age: “the whole frame of Nature, is nothing but Harmonie, as wel in soules, as bodies.”

“… Nature is nothing but harmony”, from John Dowland’s dedication of his Second Booke of Songs or Ayers.